Opacity
by OxEyed
Summary: Post-series. There's one thing they have in common, and it's not mutual respect. But Ryuzaki is used to people not seeing things the way they were. Bribeshipping-Ryuzaki x Mai. Rated for language. For contest.


**Opacity**

* * *

Mai's sheets smelled like humiliation.

Of course, she would never have believed this if Ryuzaki had told her; she washed the sheets twice a month with citrus-scented detergent, and who could possibly associate orange blossoms with shame? But there were other smells, with their own associations, and Ryuzaki had picked them all up over the course of the last four months. There was the talcum powder that she was constantly rubbing on her hands, the ever-varying smell of fresh air (the byproduct of drying her sheets on the balcony), Ryuzaki's own four-dollar cologne; he couldn't smell it, but Mai was always complaining about how cheap it was. Then there was the faint cloud of her vanilla-almond-honey shampoo on the pillows, and of course the smell of sex, which still reminded Ryuzaki of the often-frantic masturbatory sessions of his teenage years.

He supposed the humiliation part of it was just some subconscious shit, but psychological mumbo-jumbo had always been Mai's thing, not his, and he was forced to accept the feeling as a necessary evil. The one time he had tried suggesting that they go back to his dorm room instead of her place, the tone of mockery laced through her laugh had rung in his ears for days.

So it's not like he wasn't aware how colossally fucked up this situation was.

Ryuzaki knew without opening his eyes that Mai was in the shower; he could hear the faint rumble of the water heater through the walls.

It should have been his cue to get the hell out of there. She was always less than pleased to see him when he did hang around, but it was easier to go back to sleep than it was to face the fact that she had somehow gotten him back here _again_, so that's what he did, stretching himself out over lavender silk sheets that were probably 1000-ply or something equally extravagant. At least it was more tolerable than his dorm room, where the mattress had broken springs and smelled like a combination of piss and vomit.

The next twenty minutes passed in a pleasantly oblivious haze that was rudely interrupted by a loud sigh, followed by the slamming of dresser drawers. "What the hell you still doing here? I thought I told you to be out by eight."

Ryuzaki opened his eyes and saw Mai, wearing only a towel, rummaging through what he knew from experience was her underwear drawer. She had a second towel wrapped around her hair like a turban, but some stray curls had gotten loose and curled around her face in a manner that might have been becoming if Ryuzaki had actually liked her. As it was, he propped himself up on his elbows so he could see the time on the alarm clock, which sat askew on the end table. The display read 10:13.

He flopped back down onto the pillows and pushed his hair out of his face. "If you don't want me here, don't invite me over in the first place."

"If I recall correctly, the only reason you're _here_ in the first place is because you were either too drunk, lazy or broke to go home when I told you to scram last night. I can't remember which it was _this_ time." With a flourish, she pulled out a pair of lacy black panties and pushed them onto the dresser, followed by a matching black bra. Then she dropped the towel and began dressing without any sign of timidity.

Ryuzaki watched. Even at twenty-seven, she was still plenty hot enough to justify it. If it pissed her off, so much the better. Anyway, it was a welcome distraction from answering her accusation, which was more or less true.

She turned away from him as she hooked the bra, and then she bent over to pick up his clothes where they lay on the floor. She tossed them onto the bed. "I wasn't kidding when I said scram, kiddo. Don't you have class to go to?"

"It's a Saturday," Ryuzaki said, but he reached for a deep red turtleneck and pulled it over his head. When he could see again, Mai was gone, and in her place he heard the distant hum of the hair dryer. Slowly he untangled himself from the sheets and got dressed. His wallet was on the coffee table in the living room, he remembered, and his shoes were probably somewhere nearby.

Yawning, he wandered through the hall, past the bathroom and guest bedroom, and into the kitchen. He found his shoes and shoved them on, then he found the coffee maker and plugged it in, digging some coffee out of a cupboard. She had a french press, but he wasn't nearly pretentious enough for _that_. Then, just because he could, he found the champagne and orange juice in the fridge and mixed them together in a tall glass. He didn't care for fruity drinks, but he drank half of it and left it on the counter. The only tolerable part of these mornings was raiding Mai's kitchen.

He was sitting on the couch placidly drinking his coffee when she reappeared, this time dressed and with her hair in a loose ponytail. She was disgusted to see him still there and had no problem expressing it. "I thought I told you to get the fuck out."

"I don't take orders from you," Ryuzaki said, propping his feet up on the coffee table. Mai wrinkled her nose and crossed into the kitchen.

"You do when you're in my—what the hell is this?"

Ryuzaki grinned. "Mimosa."

"Did you make this?"

"Do you see anyone else here?"

He heard stomping feet; then she was in front of him again, one hand on her hip and the other holding the glass, which she brandished in front of him like a weapon. "Don't get smart with me, kid. If I don't see that door closing in the next five minutes I _will_ get violent on your sorry ass."

"Don't be a bitch," he said. "You still have to give me a ride."

She rolled her eyes and strode away, muttering something to the tune of "Fucking loser."

Ryuzaki ignored her. They'd gone through this song and dance before. She'd rant at him for the entire five minutes it would take for her to drive him to the college, forcibly eject him from her car, and then he wouldn't hear from her for two or three weeks, at which point she'd reappear, cornering him between classes and dragging them either to her house or a club where she could get drunk enough to tolerate the sex. Ryuzaki had to assume it was good; he remembered it that way, but it was hard to tell when you were drunk. At any rate, he wasn't complaining about _that_ part of it. He was a poor underage college student and he didn't get much action outside of these spontaneous sleepovers. If he didn't have to put up with the hours of humiliation and the bitching, it might have been worth it.

He was only halfway through his coffee when she reemerged from the bathroom, this time wearing makeup and jiggling a set of keys in her hand. "Alright, you little punk," she said. "Time to go."

"I'm not done with my—"

She smacked him in the back of the head, knocking him forward enough to splash a few drops of coffee on his pants. "Hey, watch it!"

"Come on. I'm taking you home."

He shrugged and chugged down the last of the coffee, following her sullenly out the door and down the stairs to her car, a long blue convertible that probably cost more than his tuition. She'd left the top up; it wasn't raining yet, but the grey clouds in the sky promised a downpour at any moment.

Mai got into the driver's seat and waited for him to get in on the other side. "I can't believe I'm doing this," she said, jamming the keys into the ignition and revving the engine with a satisfying _whirr_. "I should make you walk."

Perceiving what he judged to be an empty threat—she hadn't made him walk home yet—Ryuzaki propped his legs up on the dashboard and ignored her. He'd never hit that second growth spurt everyone had promised him was coming; it looked like he'd be stuck at a miserable 5'5" for the rest of his life. Even fucking _Yugi_ was taller than him by now; he'd read in a magazine somewhere that the retired King of Games had petered out at 5'7".

Mai hadn't ever seemed to care; he remembered her making an offhand comment once about how shorter guys got better "leverage", not that he believed her. Whatever her reason for this arrangement, he was pretty sure it had nothing to do with his height or his apparent prowess. As far as he knew, it had nothing to do with him at all.

When they pulled up to the next stoplight, Mai tapped her fingernails against the steering wheel in a manic staccato that made Ryuzaki nervous. "Have you talked to Haga recently?"

He took his time in answering. He and Mai had two modes of conversation: arguing and drunken arguing. Small talk resembled neither.

"That was his name, right?" Mai said. "The kid with the glasses?"

The light turned green and the car jerked back into motion.

"Yeah," Ryuzaki said in answer to both questions. "Last week. Why?"

"Kaiba's doing another one of those tournaments. I was wondering who got invited."

"I don't know. Did you get one?"

"Of course I did, you little punk. Why do you think I'm asking?"

"You couldn't have just asked me if I was invited?"

"Were you?"

Ryuzaki slunk down into his seat and sniffed. "Maybe. I was the second-best duelist in Japan, you know."

"Yeah—four years ago! Face it: you're washed up."

"_I'm_ washed up? I don't see _you_ bringing home any trophies."

"Hon, getting laid doesn't entitle you to know a goddamned thing about my life. You have no idea what my record's like."

"Obviously it's bad enough that you spend your weekends getting wasted with guys ten years younger than you."

The wheels of the convertible squealed as Mai made a hard turn into the dorm parking lot. Almost immediately she put the car into park and turned toward him.

"You have no right to be condescending to me, Ryuzaki." She pulled her hair out of its ponytail and shook her head with enough force to loosen the curls. Her voice was hard with anger. "It's not like you're any better—I bet when you aren't skipping class to get high, you're playing video games and jerking off to bad porn. You've got maybe two people who can tolerate you enough to call you a friend, and you're only going to college in the first place so you can be a kid for four years longer, because there's no way in hell someone like you can handle real life. You should be _grateful_ I pay any attention to you at all."

Not bothering to correct her, Ryuzaki lifted his legs from the dashboard and dropped them onto the car floor with a thump. "You can be a real bitch, you know that?"

She refused to look at him; she was examining herself in the rearview mirror. "I'm just telling it like it is, hon, no need to get offended."

"You don't know a damn thing," Ryuzaki said, unbuckling his seat belt and reaching into the back seat for his bookbag, where it had been all night.

He was out of the car before she could say another word, slamming the door and shoving his hands in his pockets. He started walking without looking back, and when he finally heard the engine rise to a roar and then fade away, his shoulders slumped and he took a long, deep breath.

The insults and the name-calling were part of the routine, true, but it was getting worse and he had only himself to blame. Every time this happened, he promised himself that next time he'd tell her _no_, thanks, go to hell and get out of my life. Then she would show up in that damned blue convertible, and she would smile at him and he would think, what the hell, it can't be that bad. Maybe this time things would be different.

They never were. They only got worse and worse, and every time he woke up on those orange-blossom sheets he knew she'd made a fool of him _again_ and he'd lie there hating himself and hating her and swearing this wouldn't happen ever again, but it always did.

On his way into the dorm, he stopped by the mail room. He didn't expect to find an envelope with the KaibaCorp logo emblazoned on it—he'd more or less given up on dueling professionally—but he was still a little disappointed that there wasn't one, just a credit card bill and a handwritten letter from his mother.

He read the letter as he tramped up the three stories to his room. It was short; the entire purpose of the letter had been to forward some of his mail (more bills). There was one scribbled sentence about his older brother, who had apparently gotten engaged to some girl Ryuzaki had never heard of. That meant home for the holidays. Fucking hell. He'd gotten out of Japan for a reason.

Shoving the letter into his jacket pocket, he pushed the door to his room open, unsurprised when he found the room foggy with smoke. He hadn't been surprised when Mai accused him of being a stoner: nothing he did could get the smell of pot out of his clothes. Of all her accusations, that one had been closest to true.

Well, that and not having any friends.

"What the fuck, Kevin, it's not even noon!" He turned and addressed the lanky boy spread out on the bed by the door. "If you get caught again, I'm not taking the heat."

"Cool it, freak," Kevin said, sitting up and pulling the joint out of his mouth. "You can open the window if you care so much. And where were you all night? I was locked out for hours until I found the RA."

"Learn to take your fucking keys with you, then." Ryuzaki had no problem being callous toward his roommate. They shared a room by luck, not by choice, and their dislike for each other was mutual. Ryuzaki made his way to his bed and leaned across it to shove the window open, immediately cooling the room by several degrees. He dumped his bookbag on the floor and started to pull off his jacket, taking stock of the room. Neither of its inhabitants were particularly neat, but he could still tell when things were out of place.

"Who used my computer?" The laptop was sitting askew on top of a notebook, but he would never risk damaging the paper like that. "I told you to keep your hands off my shit."

"No one touched it," Kevin said. "We wanted to look something up but you had a password."

"Yeah, because it's my fucking computer."

"Whatever. I said no one used it."

"You just—oh, hell. Just don't do it again." After he moved the computer, Ryuzaki pulled off his shirt and found a towel on the floor of the closet, which he tossed over his shoulder and took into the small adjoining passageway. The passage provided access to the bathroom they shared with their neighbors: two upperclassmen who were popular enough to ignore Ryuzaki and smart enough to ignore Kevin. The occasional early morning lines for the shower and the squabbles over whose turn it was to buy toilet paper were the extent of their contact.

Hanging the towel on the bathroom doorknob, Ryuzaki undressed and got into the shower, where he made the water as cold as he could bear it and stood under the onslaught, trying to forget everything about the last twenty-four hours. Instead he focused on the rest of the day: the projects he still had to finish, the essay due on Monday, the concept sketches he had promised Haga.

He let all his small, everyday stresses come crawling back into his mind, crowding out that problem that was Mai until he felt like he could move back into the swing of everyday life without wanting to throttle somebody. Then he turned the water up and washed his hair.

When he finally got out of the shower, he wrapped the towel around his waist, letting his wet hair drip down his shoulders, and stepped back into passage, which also contained two sinks and a set of drawers.

The passageway was cold, no doubt a result of the open the window, and Ryuzaki was looking for a toothbrush when he heard voices from the bedroom. He ignored them—Kevin had friends over all the time—but he recognized something familiar about the soft murmur, and then Kevin laughed, his voice clearly audible through the closed door.

"Well, of course he's _good_, that's why he got that scholarship—"

Ryuzaki's heart turned to stone and plummeted into his stomach, and he pulled the door open, clutching fiercely at the towel around his waist with his other hand. Mai was standing by his bed; her back was to him and Ryuzaki was poised to slam the door shut again when she turned around, her lips falling apart to laugh. Then came a wild shriek of laughter, but it wasn't from her. It was from Kevin, and Ryuzaki flushed.

"Get out!" He was unable to tear his eyes away from Mai or to keep the edge of hysteria out of his voice; he saw her expression cloud with confusion, and then he reached back and grabbed the first thing he saw. It was a stick of deodorant, and he threw it violently at Kevin's bed, taking deep satisfaction in his roommate's yelp of surprise.

"Get out," he said again, this time looking at Kevin. "Now."

Kevin grumbled, but a few seconds later the door was closing behind him, and, his chest heaving, Ryuzaki turned to face Mai. All he could think was _please don't laugh don't laugh don't— _but it looked like she'd managed to swallow her smile, so he clutched the towel tighter around his waist, wishing he hadn't opened the window, because the cold air on his wet skin was just one more factor in a quickly rising pile of reasons he wanted to drop off the face of the earth.

But he had to say something, so he forced himself to stand straight and looked her in the eye. "What are you doing here?"

In reply, she held up a cell phone he recognized as his own. "You left it at my place." He must have still looked suspicious, because she sighed and added, "Stop looking at me like that. That's the only reason I'm here."

"Then you should leave." Ryuzaki shifts his weight and glances past Mai toward his closet. All he wanted at this moment was to get a layer of fabric (or three) between him and her.

Instead of answering, she put the phone carefully down on the desk, the edges of her fingers brushing against an open notebook. The pages fluttered, and she paused. Ryuzaki knew without looking what page she was looking at an ink drawing of the alley behind his house, complete with dumpsters and laundry lines. When he was younger, he used to duel the neighborhood kids there. Of course, Mai didn't know that; she only saw a dirty street, but Ryuzaki was used to people not seeing things.

Her eyes rose from the sketchbook to the wall, and Ryuzaki flinched in the doorway, because the wall was the last place he wanted her to look. He watched her eyes as they traveled to the space above his desk— mostly conceptual pieces, sketches of local buildings and empty classrooms and the designs he did for Haga—to the space next to the window, where he'd taped up recent class assignments—still lifes and collages, mostly, and a large surrealist piece straight out of Dali's nightmares, done in Copic markers. Then she looked above the bed, where he put his favorite works; there were several paintings of duel monsters, but most of them were creatures straight out of his own mind. Gargantuan monsters, especially dinosaurs, had always been his favorite.

There were only two human figures on the wall. One was a nude study in pencil done for class, and the other was a watercolor of a harpy, hanging unobtrusively under a much larger oil painting of a dragon.

Ryuzaki didn't know if her gaze had lingered on the watercolor; her back was to him and who knew how much she had seen before he opened the door. At this point it didn't matter if she saw the fantasy novels on the shelf, the art supplies stuffed in boxes under his bed, or the storage bin of Duel Monster cards beside his desk. The damage had already been done.

The papers on the wall fluttered, and Ryuzaki shivered. It had finally started to rain, and the tap of raindrops against the open window made Mai finally tear her eyes away from the wall. When she turned to him, her expression was blank.

"I never asked you what your major was."

Unable to stand the cold and the wet and the scrutiny anymore, Ryuzaki jerked out of the doorway, keeping his head down as he pushed past her and to his closet, where he had to kick a pile of dirty clothes out of the way just to slide open the door. "It doesn't matter," he said, keeping his back to her as he opened the dresser and found a pair of boxers that he slipped on under the towel. He didn't look her as he got dressed; he felt that if he saw even a hint of a smile he would die of mortification. "It's not like you ever cared."

"I guess that explains how you managed to get into an American college."

Ryuzaki almost turned around at that, but he doesn't want to see the look in her eyes. "What's that supposed to mean?" He muttered instead, pulling on a t-shirt that stuck uncomfortably to his wet skin.

She seemed to understand that she'd stepped into forbidden territory. "I just meant that you're very good."

"You don't have to pretend to care, Mai. It doesn't make up for anything."

He was in the process of zipping up a sweatshirt as he turned around, and he saw her sitting on his bed, smoothing her skirt over her legs, her fingers playing at the hem that just barely reached her knees. She looked up. "You probably want me to apologize."

"It doesn't matter what you do," Ryuzaki repeated, crossing his arms and staring out the window. "I thought you were leaving."

Her fingers tightened and she glared at him. "Well, if that's what you _want_—"

He was about to tell her that yes, that's exactly what he wanted; the words were on the tip of his tongue, and he hesitated, because the expression on her face was the same one she had worn yesterday when she'd asked him to go out for drinks, the same one when she'd pinned him against her refrigerator and kissed him, her mouth tasting like salt and vodka and strawberries, and the same one she'd worn when she'd rolled over on the bed and told him with a tired voice that _just this once_ he could spend the night.

He knew she cried into her pillow when she thought he was asleep, and he'd thought it was just evidence of how much she hated him. There was certainly hate behind her mocking smile and her desperate laughter, but there was also pain, and there was also hope, and he inevitably gave in, because he recognized in that expression something of himself.

"If you want to apologize for being a stubborn bitch, you can be my guest," he said. He walked to the bed and leaned past her to pull the window closed. He had to put a knee up on the bed to reach the latch, and when he closed the window he suddenly felt a sense of finality, and he sighed. "But I really don't care and I don't think you do either."

He heard the scuff of her heels against the carpet, and leaned back in time to see her smile, but not with malice, just simple agreement.

"It wasn't just about convenience, you know," she murmured, staring at the floor. "I'm not totally heartless."

"Then what was it about?"

She glanced up at him, seeming startled by the fact that he had been listening. "I don't know," she said. "Maybe…maybe I just wanted things to go back to the way they were."

"That doesn't make any sense."

She laughed. "I guess not," she said. "Sorry about everything, hon. I'll leave now."

She stood, smoothing out her skirt, and something about that unconscious action made Ryuzaki feel nauseous.

"Hey," he said, and she twisted to look at him. Her curls had started to frizz from the moisture in the air.

"See you later," he said.

She paused, and then she winked at him, her smirk so arrogant it made him want to hate her all over again.

"Later, kiddo."

Then she was gone and Ryuzaki sank into his desk chair with a sigh. A few moments later Kevin came back in, chomping on an unlit joint and grinning.

"Who was that?" he asked. "She was way too hot to be your girlfriend."

"If it was any of your fucking business, I'd tell you," Ryuzaki said, spinning toward his desk. He pushed a clump of wet hair out of his face and pulled his computer toward him, opening it and tapping in the four digits of his password. Here at his desk, the metallic odors of lead and paint and rain mixed with the more acrid smell of marijuana, but beneath all of that was another smell, one so faint it might have been a memory.

Ryuzaki reached for a pencil and opened his email, chewing on the eraser until his hair was dry and he'd completely forgotten the distant tang of citrus.

**End**

* * *

A/N: My biggest problem with this story is that I don't have the time to write a companion piece from Mai's POV. Complete understanding of either character's feelings and motivations would be impossible from just one POV-I don't think they even understand themselves. So I apologize for any lack of clarity. (Though in my defense, that is kind of the point?)

I don't have much to say about _Opacity_ other than that, but I do ramble for a bit about headcanons over on my livejournal: http :/oxeyed .livejournal .com/ 8986 .html


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